A psychological page-turner, rich in setting, character, and wisdom.
One very hot summer in an Israeli city, two lonely people discover the life-changing power of a lie.
“In the ice cream parlor next door, the girl went behind the glass counter and began handing spoons of ice cream to those who wanted to taste, knowing that summer vacation was about to end and no one had yet tasted her, the only girl in her class still a virgin, and next summer when the fields yellowed, she would be wearing a soldier’s army green.” Nofar’s name means “water lily” but she thinks of herself as “zit face.” Her friends have dropped her, her younger sister is more beautiful and popular, and when a rude customer cruelly insults her, she loses it entirely. She rushes from the store screaming, the customer follows her, a crowd forms, the cops arrive—and a charge of attempted rape of a minor is made. Only an unhappy boy watching from his apartment knows it didn’t happen. As his attempt to blackmail Nofar turns into her first romance, she’s also becoming a national celebrity, lauded for her bravery and supplied with free designer outfits for TV appearances. Gundar-Goshen (Waking Lions, 2017) pauses Nofar’s story to introduce Raymonde, a resident of a senior citizens’ center who assumes her dead best friend’s identity so she can take a trip the other woman was about to go on. She didn’t realize this would entail becoming a speaker about her (nonexistent) experiences surviving the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Like Nofar, Raymonde’s lie brings her magical good fortune. Ah, if it were only that simple. The author unfurls her ironic fable—simultaneously timeless and contemporary—from a God’s-eye view, with captivating authority and in lush prose. “His heart had pounded furiously all night, not even letting up at dawn, as if a new branch of a twenty-four hour supermarket had opened in its chambers.”
A psychological page-turner, rich in setting, character, and wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44539-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
In Japan, a daughter explores the crime of passion that took her mother’s life.
Sumiko was just 7 when her mother died and her father moved away; she was raised by her grandfather, who has always maintained that her mother was killed in a car accident. Twenty years later, she answers a phone call meant for him from a prison administrator with information about inmate Kaitarō Nakamura; when the caller realizes whom she is speaking with, she hangs up. With just this detail, Sumiko begins an obsessive quest. She turns up an article headlined “WAKARESASEYA AGENT GOES TOO FAR?” from which she learns that Kaitarō Nakamura was an agent in the “marriage breakup” industry. He was hired by her father to seduce her mother in order to provide grounds for divorce. Nakamura claims that he and her mother had fallen in love and were about to start a new life together. When Sumiko visits Nakamura's defense attorney, the woman hands over all her files and videotaped interviews with her client. Weaving through the story of Sumiko’s search and her recollections of her childhood is the story of her mother and her lover, from the moment he pretended to meet her accidentally at the market and moving inexorably to the murder scene. Scott is a Singaporean British writer born and raised in Southeast Asia; her debut is inspired by a 2010 case in Tokyo and based on years of research. The book proceeds slowly, lingering on enjoyable details of Japanese landscape and food but perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages.
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54470-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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